It's been a long time coming, but they finally got it done. At the Interop show in Las Vegas, a group working on standardizing the Network Access Control protocol demonstrated the new IETF NEA standard for the first time.

Aimed at harmonizing with Cisco's NAC efforts, the new NEA standard could eventually garner commercial support.

But that's set to change with the completion of a new IETF standard for NAC, dubbed Network Endpoint Assessment (NEA).

At the Interop conference this week, the open source alliance OpenSEA demonstrated the first implementation of the NEA standards was demonstrated in the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) booth. The TCG is the organization behind the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) NAC standards that have won the support of a myriad of vendors including HP, Juniper and Microsoft.